The card was still in my coat pocket when I got to my car. I didn’t drive anywhere for probably twenty minutes. I just sat there with the engine off in the parking lot of a Route 7 diner, holding this little rectangle of white cardstock like it was going to tell me something different if I stared at it long enough.

It said: Keisha Monroe. Director, Second Door Foster Services.

I put my daughter into the foster care system when she was three years old. I signed the paperwork on a Tuesday in March of 2004. I was 27. She didn’t cry when I handed her over. I did, on the drive back, somewhere on I-85, ugly crying into the sleeve of a blazer I’d bought specifically because I wanted to look like I belonged at the law firm. I don’t know why I remember that detail about the blazer. I just do.

Her name is Keisha. I named her that. It’s the one thing I got to give her that actually stuck.

I need to back up a little, because I don’t want you to think I was some cold person who just didn’t want to be bothered. I want to be honest about this because I’ve been carrying it for over twenty years and I’m tired of the version of myself I’ve built around it.

Her father, Marcus, left when Keisha was eight months old. Not dramatically. He just stopped coming back. One week he was there, then he wasn’t, and I was a first-year associate at a firm in Charlotte pulling close to 70 hours a week, making $78,000 a year, which sounds like a lot until you subtract childcare and rent and student loans on a law degree and the emergency costs that come with a baby and no partner and no family nearby who could help.

My mom was in Memphis. My aunt had her own situation. I had nobody I could actually call at 11pm on a Wednesday when I had a filing due at 9am and Keisha had a fever of 103.

I kept telling myself I just needed to get through the first year. Then the second year. Then I’d be more stable, more established, I’d figure it out. But every month I got further behind, not financially, more like emotionally. I was so exhausted that I started going through days on autopilot. I’d pick Keisha up from daycare and I’d be so depleted I couldn’t even really be present with her. She’d be talking to me, little three-year-old babble, and I’d be mentally drafting a memo. I hate that. I hate admitting that.